Event Recap: Dos and Don’ts for Working with Creators

So you want to hire an influencer to pitch your company. But how do you make sure you hire the right one?

At The Information’s annual Creator Economy Summit, attendees gathered to discuss how to avoid common partnership mistakes during the “Brands, Creators and Campaigns” masterclass session.

Panelists included: Jamie Gutfreund, chief marketing officer at Whalar, Erin Chin, the chief marketing officer at Logitech for Creators, and Avi Gandhi, head of creator partnerships at Patreon.

With thousands of content creators swarming platforms like TikTok and YouTube, finding the influencer best suited to a brand can be tedious. Gandhi expressed the importance of brand alignment over creator popularity.

“You see so many brands that have a bad experience in the creator space and then say, ‘Well, creators don’t work,’” Gandhi said. “It’s not that creators don’t work. It’s that you try to do what might have worked in the 90s when it was a movie star, but it’s a much more fragmented world we live in now.”

Gutfreund compared the creator search process to dating. She advises brands to pay close attention to how they present themselves and to ensure they get to know the creator.

“People are still brands,” Gutfreund said. “You should still view creators as hired talent and not actors.”